Play of Colours (Farbenspiel) Trio Partout. The reason Bax’s Elegiac Trio has been recorded so frequently – more often than any other of his works excepting Tintagel and the Clarinet Sonata – has something to do with its delectable brevity, but more to do with the fact that it makes an ideal companion to Debussy’s famous sonata for the same, unusual forces. Because the English work was written one year after the French, the assumption has often been made that its composer was consciously writing an hommage: but Graham Parlett’s recent examination of composition, performance and publication dates suggests strongly that Bax could not have heard Debussy’s masterly sonata (or studied the score) before writing his own. The near-simultaneous appearance of these lovely works may well have been happy chance.